7'6" x 11'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | All-Over Floral Palmette Design | Red Field, Ivory Border

This 7'6" x 11'3" Tabriz was knotted in northwest Persia on a cotton foundation with a wool pile, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. What sets it apart from the usual big red Persian rug is the layout: instead of one dominant medallion the weaver ran a balanced all-over floral system from end to end, so the pattern reads the same whichever way you walk into the room and nothing important disappears under a coffee table or a sofa. At just over 11 feet long it lands squarely in the useful 8x11 Persian rugs range, large enough to carry a full seating group with all four legs on the wool. The pile is even, the ivory ends and selvedges are clean, and the rug is in excellent condition.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn as a mirrored lattice of thin ivory vine scrolls that link large feathered palmettes, split leaves, rosettes and small budding blossoms, the classic Tabriz interpretation of the Shah Abbas floral repertoire. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you can see how carefully the drawing is resolved: each palmette is outlined in a darker shade, the curling saz leaves swing in opposite directions to keep the movement alive, and an 8 petal rosette sits at the crossing point of every pair of vines. That symmetry is the hallmark of all over rugs from the better urban workshops. The main ivory border repeats a stately palmette and arabesque chain, flanked by two narrow guard stripes of running blossoms, and the corners are turned correctly, which is a reliable sign of a cartoon drawn by a professional designer rather than copied by eye.

A Deep Madder Red Field Cooled by Ivory and Blue

The ground is a warm madder red with a faint brick tone, and because the wool takes light differently along the nap it shifts between a deeper oxblood and a brighter tomato red as you move around the rug. Against that field the palette is unusually varied for a red Persian rug: sky blue and navy carry the palmette centers, sage and olive green fill the leaves, soft gold and camel outline the vines, and touches of peach, rose and chocolate brown appear inside the smaller blossoms. The wide ivory border lifts the whole composition and keeps the red from feeling heavy, which is exactly why buyers shopping red and burgundy rugs tend to gravitate toward an ivory framed Tabriz. Reds like this one sit comfortably with walnut and mahogany furniture, cream walls and brass or antique gold metals.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, the place where the cartoon, the designer and the master weaver operate as a workshop rather than a household. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the discipline of that system shows here in the straight rows and the tight, regular knotting visible on the reverse in the ruler photograph. The foundation is cotton, which holds the rug square and flat, and the wool pile has the firm, slightly crisp handle that Tabriz wool is known for, the reason these rugs take heavy traffic for generations without going thin. Even, well spun wool, correct corner resolution and a clean back are the three things to judge a city Persian rug on, and this one answers all three.